They ran and ran and then stopped, out of breath; as they panted, they saw the village far behind them. After their experiences the day before, they were happy enough to head away from the village, and continued on towards the regimented line of pine trees that bounded the eastern border of the moor.
A green sign at the edge of the forest declared that this was Waverley Woods, part of the Waverley Hall estate, though there was nothing to suggest that it was either private or out of bounds. Rachel and Adam peered into the forest, which was dense with the fingers of tall pines. To one side lay a huge stack of logs where the fast-growing trees had been cut for timber. A straight, narrow track had been beaten between the rows of trees and Rachel and Adam stepped into the wood, drawn in by the resinous scent of the pine needles that covered the forest floor, and a welcoming chorus of birdsong.
“I love that smell.” Rachel breathed deeply, scrunching a handful of the green needles in her fist. The air was instantly cooler in the shade of the forest. Sunshine swam through the branches, but under the trees it was as dark as twilight. Adam marched ahead down the track, swishing at the pine needles on the ground with a long stick.
They came to a large, circular clearing, where more trees had been recently felled and the woods seemed suddenly to stop. On the other side of the clearing the foliage was more established: older and slower-growing. Lush, green ferns sprouted at the foot of gnarled, thick trees, with leafy branches that reached out to the clear blue sky above.
“That’s more like it,” Adam shouted back at his sister, leaping across the clearing. “Something I can climb.”
“Be careful,” Rachel called after him, realizing as she did so that her words would have no effect. Adam disappeared into the old part of the wood and Rachel followed.
Here, the wood was even darker than it had been beneath the pines, and cooler. It was almost chilly. Rachel walked between the irregular trees for a few minutes, following a rough path between the ferns, straining to look upward for signs of her brother. She guessed that he was hiding from her, as usual.
Suddenly, the birdsong stopped as though at some prearranged signal, and the wood fell very quiet.
Rachel felt alone.
“Adam…?” She cupped a hand to her mouth. Nothing. “Aad-aam?”
Rachel tentatively moved on a few steps. She could smell smoke. The caw of a bird high above her made the hairs on her neck prickle. “Adam, this is stupid.” Rachel heard the crack of a branch and a small, thick stick landed a few centimetres behind her, narrowly missing her head as it whistled past.
Rachel looked up and saw her brother high above her, perched on a branch, pressing his finger urgently to his lips. He steadied himself and gesticulated at her with his other hand to come up and join him. Rachel looked up at the tree, then round its base for a foothold. She wasn’t much of a climber; that was Adam’s department. Rachel was about to admit defeat, when a rope, knotted at regular intervals, was lowered down in front of her eyes by her brother. Rachel grasped it firmly and began to climb.
Several metres up, Adam’s firm hand grabbed Rachel’s arm and pulled her up to the thick branch on which he was balancing. Still urging Rachel not to speak, Adam spoke in a hoarse whisper, “Check this out…” He pointed to where the rope joined the trunk at the junction of the next branch. Another knot of ropes was lashed to the trunk and snaked away between the leaves, as did two further ropes, like the rigging of a sailing ship. The lower formed a kind of tightrope and the two higher ones were handrails. Pushing aside some branches and flat, green leaves, Rachel could see that Adam had discovered an aerial rope bridge between the trees. A complex network of ropes ran from tree to tree, with their final destination concealed, as they disappeared into thick, green foliage.
“But why do we have to—” Rachel’s question was cut short by the flat of her brother’s hand over her mouth.
“There’s something going on over there,” Adam hissed, nodding in the direction of the rope bridge. “Come on.”
The ropes swayed and bounced as they took up Rachel and Adam’s weight, but once they had their balance and had set up a rhythmic step, the bridge felt more rigid. Adam pushed on through dense leaves, which swished back into Rachel’s face. Unable to spare an arm to protect herself, Rachel looked down at the ground far below and suddenly felt sick, as if she would fall. She shut her eyes tight, moving on in tiny steps until the whipping of the leaves stopped. She felt Adam’s hand steady her, and, opening her eyes, found herself in an open area within the trees, suspended above the ground and beneath the tree canopy.
Rachel gasped, allowing herself to look quickly round. It was like a wooded cathedral; a vast open space created by the highest trees, which formed a roof over the top. Smoke hung in the still air. Below the green canopy, smaller trees, some skeletal and dead-looking, formed an internal structure, joined together by rope bridges such as the one they stood on, with galleries, walkways, ladders and crow’s nests made from scrappy planks and branches.
Adam hauled Rachel up on to the wooden platform he had reached at the end of the rope, and Rachel was glad to have her feet on something more solid, even such rickety planks. Rachel followed Adam up a couple of wooden steps nailed to the tree trunk into a tiny tree house. There was barely room inside for both of them. It can only be a lookout, she thought. For hunting, or maybe as a hide for birdwatching.
Adam pointed to a small slit in the side of the hut.
Rachel pressed her face to the peephole and realized, with sudden, sickening certainty that they shouldn’t be here.
From her vantage point, Rachel could make out a kind of encampment below. Several logs formed rough benches round a fire. On the other side of the fire was a camper van that didn’t look as if it had moved for several years. It was painted green, covered in leaves and jungle netting, and where there had once been a VW badge there was now a spray-painted symbol.
A Triskellion.
In the centre of the encampment, at what seemed to be the focal point of the whole clearing, a tree had been turned upside down; its thick trunk sunk into the earth, the roots exposed to the open air like a pair of vast, cupped hands. Rachel thought how weird it looked, wrenched from the ground, uprooted, exposing the parts that shouldn’t be seen. Stranger still, round the edge of the encampment stood figures so well camouflaged that they might almost have been mistaken for foliage.
When they began to move, Rachel saw that there were fifteen or twenty people below her, dressed in rags, furs and leaves, their faces blackened with earth. One or two of them had branches or antlers attached to their heads, like mythical forest creatures. Adam pushed his face close to hers to get a look at the scene and Rachel could tell from his rapid breathing that he was every bit as petrified as she was.
On the ground, the headlights of the camper van blazed into life, spotlighting the upturned tree, as the door on the side of the van slid open. A tall man, wearing a worn, floor-length leather coat and knee boots stepped out and stood facing the upturned tree. His face was blackened, like the others, but his eyes stood out: a piercing blue. He stepped forward and leant against the tree with one hand as if deriving strength from it, muttering under his breath.
After a moment, he turned to face the camouflaged men that were gathered round the fire, and studied them, unsmiling. His long hair and beard looked wet, as if he had recently showered. He nodded at one of the forest people who, with two others, opened the back of a battered, white truck that was concealed in the bushes.
From the back of the truck the men wrestled two figures. Their heads were covered in sackcloth bags, but Rachel recognized one of them from his washed-out denims and T-shirt.
“It’s those guys who beat you up yesterday,” she whispered.
Adam hissed. “I know…”
The youths writhed and struggled, but the bear-like forest men were too strong for them and dragged them to the upturned tree, tying them by their wrists to the outstretched roots, so that their chests were pr
essed against the rough bark. They bucked and craned their necks backwards, straining and twisting, trying to shake off the hoods and see their captors. After a few moments their grunts and protests faded to whimpers and finally stopped and the area inside the woods fell silent.
The man in the leather coat approached the limp, panting figures, and began to speak; his resonant voice audible even from Rachel and Adam’s hiding place.
“Gary and Lee Bacon. You have broken the Code of the Green Men, and it is they who make the law in Triskellion.” The man paced up and down, coming closer to the hooded head of one of the youths. “The Green Men decide who stays and who goes,” he spat. “Not snotty-nosed chavs who attack anything they don’t understand. You will live and die by the Code of the Green Men. Have you anything to say before sentence is carried out?”
One of the Bacon boys whimpered from beneath his hood. The sound of his undiluted terror turned Rachel’s stomach to water. The man spoke again.
“Which of you punched the incomer?”
“Gary done it,” came the muffled yelp from inside the hood.
“Loyal, too,” said the man with the beard, trudging back to the camper van. “Do them both.” He nodded to another of the forest men – a huge figure, his face black with charcoal, and what looked like a fox pelt mounted with a deer’s skull strapped to his head.
The man walked towards the prisoners. The other figures tensed and drew closer, while, anticipating what was about to happen, the Bacon boys whimpered and moaned beneath their hoods.
Up in the tree, Rachel felt her lip tremble, and hid her eyes as Adam’s fingers dug into her arms, unable to tear his gaze away from the terrible ritual unfolding below.
The man stepped up close to one of the captives. He grasped the neck of the boy’s T-shirt and tore until the pale flesh of his back was exposed. He walked round the stump and ripped at the shirt of the second boy. When he had finished, the man stood back, allowing two of his fellow Green Men to step forward. Each clutched a long, flexible stick, and, on the nod of the man in the leather coat, they began to beat the Bacon boys.
Rachel and Adam clung to each other, huddled together in a ball as the screams of Gary and Lee Bacon tore through the silence of the woods. The thrashing seemed to continue for an age, with each cry of agony making Rachel and Adam flinch as if they were being beaten themselves. Finally it stopped and Adam ventured an eye back up to the peephole. Through the slit in the lookout, he could see the bodies of the two boys hanging limply from the roots. The single back he could see clearly was raised with angry, red welts.
Then, another leaf-covered figure moved forward towards the punishment tree. His face was blackened like the others, but on his head he wore a battered, black top hat. Ivy trailed round the brim, and, from the crown, sharpened twigs stuck out like spines. As he turned to face the nearer boy, Adam could see that he wore a long leather apron. He lifted something heavy from his side.
In his hand was a chainsaw. The man pulled on the starting cord…
Adam had seen enough. Using the noise of the chainsaw as cover, he grabbed Rachel and hurtled out of the tree house, dropping down on to the lower branch.
Rachel found that her vertigo had disappeared as she bounced back along the rope bridge. She followed her brother, stumbling in her haste, ignoring the sting of the branches flicking back into her face and catching in her hair. Propelled by adrenaline, they arrived back at the original knotted rope in seconds, throwing themselves back down on to the forest floor and tearing off together towards the line of trees.
Some fifty or sixty metres away, its crackle deadened by the thick woodland, the chainsaw continued to splutter and buzz…
In the clearing, the man with the chainsaw had cut through the ropes that were holding up the prisoners. The Bacons sat on the earth, nursing their wounds while other Green Men began to disperse back into the forest and into the tree houses above. The door of the camper van slid open again, and the bearded man in the leather coat walked over and pulled off the hood from each boy’s head.
The Bacon brothers stared up at the man’s blackened face, trembling like frightened dogs. The man took a wallet from a pocket inside his long leather coat and peeled off two fifty-pound notes. He tossed them down at the boys grovelling below him.
“Buy yourselves some shirts,” he said calmly, without malice. “Now get out of my sight.”
The man walked slowly back to the camper van, while the two boys snatched up the money and scurried off into the undergrowth like small, scared animals freed from a gin trap.
Rachel and Adam stood, panting, at the edge of the chalk circle.
Instinctively, the circle had seemed the place to head for. It was out in the open, where they could be seen by anyone who cared to look, but where no one would be able to corner or trap them. Still catching their breath, they took a step forward together into the circle itself and both felt perceptibly safer within its circumference.
Rachel turned and looked back across the moor towards the woods. Nobody had followed them. Hopefully nobody had seen them, because surely if they had been witness to some terrible murder, then they themselves would be in great danger.
“D’you think they … you know, with the chainsaw?” Adam appealed to his sister, thinking exactly the same as she was.
Rachel shook her head. “Nah. No way.” But she said it as much to reassure herself as Adam.
They turned back towards the centre of the circle and saw, beetling towards them from the direction of the village, a black-coated figure, waving a stick of some sort in front of him. From a distance it looked as if he were sweeping the moor, keeping it tidy.
“Hello-oo,” the man called out in a honking, nasal voice. Before Rachel or Adam could answer, they heard a high squeal through the headphones he was wearing and realized that the stick was in fact a metal detector. He dropped quickly to his knees, producing a small trowel from a pocket and began burrowing in the earth. He looked like a giant mole in his big overcoat, spraying earth out from either side.
Within seconds, the man found what he was looking for and held up something covered in earth between his fingers. Adam drew closer to see what it was. The man brushed away the loose soil and held up a dull metal coin.
“What is it?” Adam asked.
“A halfpenny piece.” The man handed the coin to the boy. “George the Third.”
“George who?” Adam asked.
“King George the Third…” the man enunciated deliberately.
Adam turned the coin over in his fingers. On one side was a man wearing a laurel wreath. On the other, a picture of a woman carrying a trident and the word “BRITANNIA”.
“So how old would this be?” Adam looked up from the coin at the man’s craggy face. Rachel could tell from his tone that her brother was seriously interested.
The man rubbed at the coin with a blackened thumb revealing the date. “1807,” he said. “Two years after the Battle of Trafalgar.”
Adam looked closely again at the coin. If the age of the stone circle had sparked his curiosity, Rachel could see that this had got him completely hooked.
“So is this, like, worth a lot of money?” Adam rubbed the halfpenny between his fingers and the metal began to shine through.
“Not much. Few quid. Ten, maybe. People have been burying coins in this spot since coins was invented.”
“Why did they bury them?” Rachel asked, wishing to appear interested herself.
“For good luck. People always knew the Triskellion was good luck, so they’d bury money here by the circle in the hope some of it would come their way.”
“So have you found others?” Rachel continued politely.
“Plenty recently. Seems like the earth is spitting quite a few of them back out just now.”
“You mean there are more like this? And older?” Adam was sounding keener by the minute. The idea that the last person to have touched this coin had earned it two hundred years before made his head spin.
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br /> “Much older. You want to see some?” The man’s face split into a fearsome grin and he nodded at Adam. Adam nodded back.
The man thrust out a grubby hand. “Jacob Honeyman. Beekeeper. How do you do?”
Adam shook the man’s hand. “I’m Adam. We’re staying up at Root Cottage with our grand—”
“Roots?” Honeyman barked. “You’re Roots?”
“We’re Newmans, actually,” Rachel said. “Root is our mother’s maiden name.”
Honeyman slowly looked from Rachel to Adam, and then grinned, treating them to a fine view of his gums and irregular teeth. “Once a Root, always a Root,” he said. The grin vanished from his face as quickly as it had appeared, then he turned abruptly and began marching away.
“Come on then, off we go…”
Before Rachel could make excuses about returning for lunch, her brother was off, following closely behind Jacob Honeyman, whose black coat flapped behind him as he marched away across the moor.
“There’s a few really old ones in here,” Honeyman said, placing a couple of flat wooden trays on the battered wooden table.
They had followed the strange man back across the moor to his house. At least, “house” was what he called it. To Rachel and Adam it looked more like a corrugated tin hut with tacked-on additions and windows that had belonged originally to several other buildings.
Honeyman lifted the cover, revealing that the trays were divided into small compartments, each containing a coin and a tiny label, handwritten in a microscopic, spidery script.
“Can I?” Adam reached out to the box and Honeyman nodded his permission. Adam picked up a small, irregular nugget of brown metal, which, on close inspection, was stamped with a dog-like animal on one side, and a star on the other.
Triskellion Page 4
